Regulate IVF in an Age of No Boundaries? Not a Chance

Will Saletan of Slate writes an always thought provoking column that is a favorite of SHS’s. The gold of Saletan’s approach is that he takes a step back and expertly points out problems with, and logical outcomes of, behavior or policies—although he never seems to promote any real solutions. I suspect that he doesn’t see that as his job.

Having previously discussed the slippery slope of IVF, in this column Saletan warns of another “slippery slope” on the side of the hill that would regulate IVF and related technologies. His column illustration is a pending Georgia bill that once sought to limit the number of IVF embryos that could be implanted—which, as I predicted, was hammered so hard that it had to be amended. The current bill would ban all human cloning—hooray—and would only permit IVF for the treatment of infertility.

Sounds reasonable to me, but Saletan notes that the bill could be construed to prevent fertile couples from using IVF coupled with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)—genetically testing the embryos for eugenic purposes prior to implantation to weed out the unacceptable—in order not just to have a baby, but to have the kind of baby (whether based on health or cosmetic desires) they want. From his column:

I don’t know whether the bill will pass the Georgia House. But this is just the beginning. The bill is part of a nationwide project to regulate the emerging industry of embryo production. In one state or another—and then another and another—legislation will be filed to restrict IVF. Based on the Georgia experiment, these bills will probably make exceptions for infertility but not PGD. The battles, then, will be fought over which uses of PGD are acceptable. And these fights will be every bit as ugly as the preceding fights over abortion.

This column is dedicated to making us look at ugly facts and moral problems we don’t want to see. For several years, one of these problems has been the slippery slope of PGD. Now we’ll have to face, in all its ugliness, the slippery slope of regulating it.

I think Saletan gets a few things wrong in his piece. First, not all pro-lifers oppose IVF per se. The Catholic Church does, but that isn’t the same thing.

More to the point of this post, the idea that in this day and age we will ever reach sufficient societal consensus to constrain our growing sense of entitlement to hyper control every and all aspects of our reproductive lives—regardless of the moral costs or the deaths caused thereby—is to miss the ocean in which we currently swim. And even if we did, I doubt the judiciary, which increasingly conflates the policy desires of the Liberal “choice ubber alles” Elite with the requirements of the U.S. and state constitutions, would permit these laws to stand.

But this is the real point behind the point: While I support legislation such as the one in Georgia, in the end, law alone is not the answer. What we really need is self restraint. But how is that promoted when any and all criticisms of anyone’s “choices” are hammered as insensitive moralism? Until and unless we can escape the black hole of terminal nonjudgmentalism and reach social norms about these matters to which all are expected to abide, the “edges” will continue to be pushed, and those who do the pushing will continue to be celebrated on toxic shows like Oprah and in the even worse celebrity magazines, as the rest of us wring our hands about the collapse of our culture. Which is too bad: My hands are already pretty badly chaffed.